Memory Lane - The Glade

THE GLADE AND VALKARY HOUSE

Valkary House 1975

As an eleven-year-old boy back in 1964 I well remember my father standing in the bay window of a house called “5 Oaks” in The Glade, Kingswood. Wreathed in blue tobacco smoke from the Balkan Sobrani in his briar pipe, he was wrapped in thought looking down the garden. Perhaps he could hear the distant noise of the “Kingswood Flyer” as it rattled its way from Chipstead to Kingswood Station, beyond the woods at the bottom of the garden? Eventually he turned around and said, “I am going to offer the asking price of £10,500 for this house”.

Mrs Connie Willing, whose husband had sadly recently died, was delighted as the house had been on the market for some time since his death. My mother on the other hand was horrified. “We cannot possibly afford it” she said. At the time we were living in a small house at 43 Richmond Drive, Watford, but the gap between the two financially meant a maximum mortgage would be required. This worried my mother!

The next shock came a couple of days later when the local estate agent, down by the bridge in Kingswood – where they still are, I believe – told us that later that day another couple had offered the asking price and they intended to invite both parties to make a further offer which in effect turned the sale into an auction. After much angst, my father offered £10,578. The other party offered £10,570, so we won the auction by £8.

The first thing that happened once we finally moved in was to change the house name to “Valkary House”. On a visit to Kingswood in 2020, I was pleased to see that the name has not changed. Valkary was the place in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, where my parents had got engaged in 1951 so it was poignant – albeit for some unknown reason the house name spelling was slightly different from the place in Ceylon.

We lived happily there from 1964 to 1980 when the house was sold because my parents moved to the South of France, to enjoy sailing their Moody 40 Yacht around the Mediterranean in their retirement. My father died in 2001 and my mother returned

John, his mother Joan and a submarine

to live her last days in Devizes in Wiltshire, near where I was living at the time.

The house had a couple of extensions while we were there but has had several more since, so it’s now much larger overall. My brother, who still lives in the area at the top of Box Hill, and I spent our teenage years there. I started playing tennis at the Kingswood Tennis Cub in 1964 as it was only 200 yards from Valkary, whilst my brother, Adrian, preferred golf, so he used to bike up to the Golf Club in Sandy Lane. I still enjoy playing tennis some 55 years later and was pleased to be able to play there again as a guest in October 2020, just before the latest Covid lockdown. I am hopeful that I may be able to play there again during one of my visits to Adrian.

It seems to me that Kingswood remains much the same, but most of the houses are larger and the village shops have changed. Lloyds Bank has gone, where I opened my personal account, which I still have to this day, and the little supermarket is now a restaurant. The Pigeon Pair pub by the railway station has been renamed and the local butcher has gone, but the wine shop is still there – albeit no longer “Threshers”.

I very much enjoyed a recent nostalgic drive around the area. I remember witnessing the dreadful fire that burnt out a neighbouring house in The Glade, on the left just before the right turn into Forest Drive, in the late 60s due to a chip fat frying pan catching fire and burning the whole house to the ground. A dreadful sight. I will never forget the anguish of the owners that day. I also passed Dr Dick’s house, the local GP, who practiced from his house at the other end of Forest Drive. He treated me for stress related shingles as a 19-year-old when I was in the Royal Navy, whilst on my submarine training course at HMS Dolphin in Gosport. I well remember “borrowing” my mother’s Datsun from the garage when she was on holiday and driving to Silverstone in it and almost crashing it on the way! She never knew!

However, my mother certainly knew about my love of cars generally. To her eternal credit she helped finance my first Aston Martin purchase, at the age of 23, whilst we were still living there and kept it in the garage at Valkary House, whilst I was at sea. I sold my mustard coloured MGB Roadster and with the help of her £500 bought a DB4 Vantage for £2,150. Needless to say, it needed substantial work which I could not afford to do. Therefore, I learnt to do it myself. This resulted in my forming an Aston Martin Specialist Restoration Company called Goldsmith and Young Ltd in 1980, which I still run today some 40 years later, down the A303 in Mere, Wiltshire. I wish I still owned that car today as its worth about £750,000. However, some consolation is that I still look after it for the current owner.

The start of my lifelong interest in historic motorsport and tennis started as a young man in Kingswood and for that I will always be grateful.